I got an early version of Steve's X-15 Delta and spent my spare time over the last week building it.

It's a great build, with some elements that fall into the "builders kit" category. Although there wasn't anything that caused any heartburn, there were a couple of steps that provided some old school fun.

The quality of materials in the kit are excellent and a template page is included to assist with a couple of steps where cutting/ shaping is involved. A CD is included which has pictures and instructions in PDF and Word. I couldn’t open the Word file due to an error, but the PDF opened fine. I didn’t print the instructions because with all of the pictures the PDF is 74 pages long and I didn’t want to kill a tree. The pictures are what adds the pages. There aren’t 74 steps involved in the build. It’s a standard build and can be completed in a reasonable amount of time.

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The first step involves washing the nose cone with warm soapy water using steel wool. This time I did the right thing and followed the directions. I learned with the V-23 build that you need to use the steel wool to make sure you get all of the mold release off of the nose cone. The nose cone itself is beautiful! It’s a custom made work of art.

Next you are given the opportunity to remove the material from both of the windows on the nose cone so that later you can put in clear plastic windows from the inside of the cone. The other option is to use clear epoxy on the window surfaces post-paint to give a realistic window look to the model. I chose to go with the second option. I just didn’t want to mess with the look of that nose cone.

Next up is to glue a length of styrene inside the nose cone with CA or Epoxy. I used epoxy. Later the screw eye that holds the nose cone to the shock cord will be inserted into the styrene rod.

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At this point you can prime the nose cone. It required no sanding. The surface was nearly flawless.

Next up is to build out the two wings. The wing components are precut making it an easy task. You do need to do some cutting on the leading edge of both finished wing components, but it was straight forward and the instructions gave all the information needed to complete the step.

From there you construct the upper and lower tail components. This was my favorite part of the build. You need to cut out four tail pieces and a top for each. The tails look good even before paint. Once painted they look great. One note: The balsa material used for the tails is thin 1/16 stock and I’ll have to see how it holds up on landing, but to give both tails some extra strength I wicked in some CA on the inside on all joints. I thought about filling the cavity on each of the tails with some foam filler but didn’t want to add any weight until I know how it flies. I did not close in the root edge of either tail so that I can fill each later with foam filler if needed.

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Once the wings and tails were attached to the body tube I built out the 24mm motor mount. The only change I made was to add a length of Kevlar line from the upper centering ring to about a foot past the upper BT opening. To that I attached the included elastic band, and trash bag chute. Steve was kind enough to include a very nice swivel that the chute attaches to. The elastic is tied to the nose cone and construction is complete.

The only step I skipped (for now) was the creation of a card stock tail cone.

I painted the entire rocket with multiple coats of Krylon satin black paint.

I’ll add the decals after the first flight, which was supposed to be today along with the V-23, but high winds caused me to call both launches off. Why is it that whenever I have a day off there are high winds…

Here are the specs as things stand now:
Dry weight (with chute and wadding on board) 4.4 oz
With motor 6.0 oz
With .6 oz of nose weight 6.6 oz.
CG is 8.5” from rear BT

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Pleeese no launchee into forestee! Looks too good!

LOL - thanks Scott. I'm planning on staying far away from the trees.

Actually there's only one big location I can launch around here, but I have to wait until the winds die down and it's got to be when there aren't any people around.

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...still...waiting....for...that...email...

One comment about this kit...before you finished the cone did you use some method to check if extra weight was required to keep it out of the trees or the ground?

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- Dick
NAR L2, member of MDRA and NARHAMS
*** My Rocket Dungeon ***My Our Planet Page***
Keeper of EMRR's Rocksim, CP, and recommended motors databases
Co-moderator of the MicroMaxRockets, microhybrids, and OddRocs Yahoo groups
Retired moderator of The Rocketry Forum

Dick. The nose cone is wide open so I can add/remove nose weight as needed. I don't have Rock Sim so the only way I have to check the CP is using Vern's old method. Doing that I estimate the CP is 7.5" from the business end. I added .6 oz of nose weight to put the CG 8.5" from the business end.

Now my next step is to launch it and see how it performs. This rocket doesn't have a boat tail to add weight, but it does have the large wings, so I will just have to see how it performs. Most of that wing surface is at the rear where the fins would be, plus it also has the two large tail pieces to offset the wings some.

As I said I'll launch it in low to no wind conditions and when and where I can be completely alone to either enjoy watching the thrill of victory or to pick up the pieces after the agony of defeat.

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If you mentioned the added weight I missed, my bad. If you mean the cutout method, that is good because it should be conservative. Note the upper and lower stabilizers and the wing tips will not do anything for the stability in the plane looking flat at the wings. You are right that most of their area is towards the back. The standard X15 needs a fair amount of nose weight and for all I know the big wings on the Delta may actually make it more stable (?) Just rambling since I haven't looked at this.

The best part of this is you are the guinea pig on this build and, if successful, all I'll have to do is match your numbers.

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- Dick
NAR L2, member of MDRA and NARHAMS
*** My Rocket Dungeon ***My Our Planet Page***
Keeper of EMRR's Rocksim, CP, and recommended motors databases
Co-moderator of the MicroMaxRockets, microhybrids, and OddRocs Yahoo groups
Retired moderator of The Rocketry Forum

I did use the cutout method which I know is primitive, but I figure if it was good enough for Vern it's good enough for me.



LOL - I hadn't thought about it that way but you are right!

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